


what they say about the young

by maybetwice



Category: One Day at a Time (TV 2017)
Genre: Ch-ch-changes~, Empty Nest Syndrome, F/M, Families of Choice, Friends to Lovers, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/maybetwice
Summary: Without the kids around, it feels like everything has changed, except for all the other things about Penelope's life that could change, too.
Relationships: Penelope Alvarez & Schneider, Penelope Alvarez/Schneider
Comments: 10
Kudos: 125
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	what they say about the young

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paperclipbitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, paperclipbitch!! I had about one million ideas for this from your prompts that I had to wrangle back into something manageable, but I hope this hits a few of your favorite things!!

“I think Mami and I might start thinking about moving.” 

The way Penelope said it was so casual, like an afterthought that belonged to a different conversation, that Schneider thought he didn’t hear her right. He even pretended it was a joke, albeit one delivered without a laugh, for a full month.

Then she said it again, three days before she usually paid rent, while Schneider was making coffee for them in the kitchen. Only this time, instead of a flippant statement, it’s while doing bills, with a wistful sigh carried on the back of her words. 

“Uh,” said Schneider in a flat monotone. “Is that something we should talk about?”

The truth was, rent for the Rieras -- and then the Alvarezes -- hadn’t changed much in the last twenty-some years. A few adjustments with the times, but Schneider had always cited rent controls for his reasons for keeping rent low in the building. The building had never been a money-making venture, more like an investment in something entirely different, and now--

“Oh,” said Penelope, dropping the bills onto the table and scrubbing the heel of her hand over her forehead. “I mean, maybe? I don’t know. The apartment is so big now without the kids here, Mami should probably live in a unit on the ground floor, I probably could find somewhere closer to my office and cut down on my commute…”

“So, is that a yes or a no on the talking about it?” Schneider pulled the moka pot off the stove and held it up so she could see through the cutout in the wall. 

“Only if you take your landlord hat off for it.” She collected together the bills and dropped them back into the old wooden box that the family used for organizing bills. Among them, he could see the crest for Elena’s university and did his best not to visibly cringe. 

He gestured to the page with his chin. “Coming up on tuition deadlines?”

“Housing,” Penelope sighed and took another look at it. “Can you believe what they charge for Elena to live in a dorm with three other girls? You’d think she was staying at the Ritz for that much. I still have to pay for her meal plan!”

Schneider set the coffee in front of her. “I’m starting to see that my college experience wasn’t as average as I thought.” At her tart smirk, he shrugged and held out the sugar to her. “Fair enough.”

“I didn’t say anything,” she protested, rapping her pen against his shoulder. Her curls bounced like springs and Penelope brushed them back from her face, launching animatedly into her next words. “Anyway, I’m not saying we’re canceling our lease and moving next week. We’ve been here for so long, but I guess with all the changes lately, I started thinking about other things that could change, too.” 

“What would you want to change?” he asked quickly, too fast to be cool and not even really caring that it made him seem overeager. That was Schneider’s entire thing. It would be weird if he wasn’t. “Did you want new appliances? I was thinking of putting in a sparkling water tap, but that didn’t seem like something you would be interested in.”

“Do I look like I’d -- never mind.” Penelope gave a hugely exaggerated shrug. “You know how when something big changes, it sort of makes space for you to think about all the other things in your life that could use a touch up?”

“Sure, but it’s your life, not some scuffed paint.” Except that Schneider knew exactly what she was talking about. Hadn’t that been the whole theme of his sober and clean life?

“Well, yeah,” said Penelope, her whole essence giving off uncertainty. She finally stirred sugar into her coffee and waved over the pile of bills. “I don’t know! We’ll probably think about it for a hundred years and never do anything about it because we’ll never cough up the money for the kind of movers the Army hired for us.”

He knew her well enough to know that she was trying to convince herself of something more than him. Schneider pressed his mouth together in a tight seam and tried to listen as she rattled off a quick story about the movers the Army hired for her last PCS -- whatever that was, he took a silent note to Google that later -- and waited for her to come back around. 

At last, she sighed back into a graceless lump in her chair. “I don’t want to move. I do, but I don’t. We’ll be here until you sell the building and they finally raise our rent, and housing is going to be totally unaffordable, assuming all of LA hasn’t burned down by then, and then--”

Schneider didn’t have a chance to interject a thought into that downward spiral before one of the bedrooms doors opened down the hall and Lydia glided out, her spangly wrap glittering in the light. “And then you will move in with Elena, and I will move in with Papito, and everything will be fine.” She leaned over and kissed Penelope in the center of her curls. “And Schneider will visit us for dinner on Sunday.”

Penelope swatted upward, but Schneider saw the way her posture changed when Lydia came in. She straightened her spine, turned just enough that Lydia would focus on her, and cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, so I’ll get to visit my son on Sundays only?”

“Papito will be busy playing baseball, while I take care of him,” Lydia told her airily, sweeping the tasseled edge of her shawl around her neck. “And Elena will need her mother around.”

“I don’t think Elena will agree with that,” Schneider offered, rising from the table to bring a third coffee cup to the table. “Since she and Syd were talking about getting their own apartment over the summer.” 

“She’s not moving in with Syd,” Penelope snorted with a hearty laugh. “God -- Mami, imagine if I’d moved in with one of my high school boyfriends.”

“I prefer to look ahead, to the future! And not to think about cursed things that might have been.” But Lydia made the motion of the cross over her chest and looked heavenward, mouthing something that looked a lot like, _thank you._ “And in keeping with that, I must look forward to my plans with Leslie this afternoon. Goodbye.”

Penelope watched her waltz out through the door, and finally fell back into her chair with an eyeroll that seemed to flow through her entire body. “I guess Mami’s plan for the future is all set. It’s just me that worried about all that life change stuff.”

 _Not just you, Pen,_ thought Schneider while clearing the table a few minutes later, the prospect of the future weighing heavier on him than it had been before.

*

Thanksgiving was a disaster, but the kind that’s normal for the Alvarez family. Elena summoned everyone to the living room and presented her plan to move in with Syd, then got angry when Penelope laughed at her. Privately, after pouring herself a stiff drink and handing Schneider a glass of soy nog, Penelope laid out on the couch with her feet pressed against his leg and stared at the ceiling.

“I know Elena’s serious about Syd,” she said carefully, swirling her drink in her fingers. “I’m not, like, threatened by it. Worst case scenario is that they break up and she moves back in. Who cares? I was literally married and did that.”

Schneider kept quiet. He wasn’t sure that this was a two-sided conversation as much as a way for her to vent out her feelings after a tense evening. 

But after a long pause, Penelope kicked him with her heel. “Well?”

“Well, you didn’t ask me a question.” 

“I said who cares!”

Schneider chose his words carefully, staring off toward the television. Absently, he pressed his thumbs into the arch of her foot, circling rhythmically in the place where he felt the most tension. “I think you do, a little bit, Pen.” 

“Hmph.” Penelope sighed, but he felt her weight settle deeper into the cushions as she relaxed. They said nothing for a while, and he sipped his soy nog thoughtfully, before she made a soft, happy noise. “It’s the same problem as before.”

“Things changing too fast?”

“But they’re not changing that fast. This is all totally normal stuff. I’ve been excited about Elena growing up and going off to find her way in the world. Same with Alex. They’re going to be fine, but--”

But she wasn’t. Or, not as fine as she’d thought she’d be. Schneider didn’t need her to finish the thought to know what she meant. He squeezed her socked feet with both hands.

“It’s nice to have them back in the apartment, though,” he said, thinking how easily they’d all slipped back into their old dynamics. It wasn’t as though it was exactly the same. Alex and Elena were different people for having the experience of living away from home, even for a little while. Schneider wasn’t their dad -- the thought that he felt somewhat paternal toward them nearly made him snort with self-deprecating laughter -- but he sort of understood a fraction of what Penelope felt.

“We still might move.” But her voice was fainter now, the way it was when she felt comfortable and safe enough to drift toward sleep. 

Schneider lifted the glass from her fingers half an instant before her hand collapsed against the couch, extracted himself from the knot of her legs, and quietly let himself out of the apartment. Before he did, he tucked the blanket around her and glanced back at her sleeping visage one last time, thinking about other things that could change about their lives, maybe.

*

"This is just a few weeks," Penelope told him barely a month later, pressing her fingertips against her temples. "We gotta get through Christmas and New Year and then they'll be dying to get back to class. But summer break is coming. Four months of them driving me nuts."

It wasn’t entirely fair of her to put it that way. Elena had already been home a week by the time Alex made it home from post-semester baseball conditioning ahead of the spring season, and what truce they’d brokered for Thanksgiving was clearly over for the longer holidays. Lydia moved into Elena’s room three years before, when Elena started college, and it had never seemed to be an issue for her to stay in the den during her holidays before now. 

But now that Alex had moved out, she seemed to consider it his turn to sleep in the cordoned off section of the apartment. And Alex hadn’t seemed to care that Elena had already been staying in the empty bedroom for a week and a half before he turned up, expecting to displace her immediately.

"So, you don't think you'll be moving into a smaller place?" Schneider was allergic to subtlety, but it seemed like the kind of thing that might lighten the mood. 

Sure enough, Penelope’s mouth twitched with a smile. “Uh, no, because I think I’ll be moving to an island paradise where they can’t find me.”

“I could probably arrange that,” he offered with a flippant wave. “I’ll take over your parental responsibilities, Lydia will teach me the secret to her pastelito filling, and I’ll use your bedroom for extra storage.”

“Deal,” laughed Penelope, sticking out her hand to him and pulling it back when he started to take it. “But you have to remember Elena’s allergic to red dye 40, Alex likes the crusts cut off his sandwiches, and make sure you junk the boxes of Victor’s old stuff when you clear out my room.”

“And your mom doesn’t like Glade air fresheners,” he added. 

The tension in the house broke on Christmas morning, but by New Year’s Eve, even Schneider found reasons to stay away from their apartment. Elena was stressed about her upcoming classes, even though the semester wouldn’t start until a full month later, and Alex covered for his anxiety about the coming baseball season -- his first at the college level -- by pushing the limits of Penelope’s house rules. 

But for New Year’s, he came back around to find that they were all gone. All but Penelope, wandering around her empty apartment in her sweatpants and an Army t-shirt at half past eleven.

“Elena’s out playing Dungeons and Dragons with Syd, and Alex is out with some high school friends,” she explained, plugging in the Christmas tree and clearing the coffee table of the empty snack wrappers.

“I thought your mom would be home, at least,” he said from the kitchen after she let him in. The cork on the bottle in his hands popped with a loud bang, and Penelope looked in quizzically from the living room.

“She’s at some party with Doctor Berkowitz. You didn’t buy champagne just for me to drink, did you?”

“No,” laughed Schneider, holding up the bottle for her to read. “Only the finest Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider money can buy for you, Pen.”

“Good enough.” She accepted the glass, but her mind was somewhere else. Moving, probably, based on the way she seemed to be taking stock of the contents of the apartment.

“You’ll never find somewhere with a storage unit,” he said lightly, clinking his glass against hers. “Amenities like this? Phew. Easily an extra thousand a month.”

“I can buy my own sparkling cider,” she suggested. Her mouth curved upward in an obvious smile, her eyes sparkling in the dimmed lights. 

Schneider forgot not to stare, that it was the unspoken rule between them that they were only supposed to live in the same dynamic they’d always had. Neighbors, friends, landlord, but never anything else. 

“Well,” he said blankly, without any idea what he was trying to say. A quick joke would break the mood, but he couldn’t think of anything.

“It’s fine,” she said quickly, starting to turn away just as he reached for her elbow and said, “Pen--”

She turned back readily. Maybe too readily, or maybe it was his imagination. But he made the first move, and then Penelope was pushed up on her toes and her hand closing around his forearm, bracing her weight against his when she pitched forward to kiss him. 

And it was… well, it wasn’t better than he’d imagined, because Schneider spent a lot of his time pretending he didn’t want this, like he did with so much. It was easier to avoid pining for something if you never allowed yourself to admit you wanted it at all. It _was_ very good, though. 

It was over quickly, the bubbling effervescence in his chest lasting much longer than the warmth of her breath against his mouth, but Penelope’s cheeks were visibly warmed as she smoothed her hair back from her face, shuffling in place.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Scuffed paint, you know?” 

“It’s not to me,” he explained quickly, jamming his hands into his pockets and looking somewhere that wasn’t at her. “I mean. Plenty of my life can change, but this isn’t…”

Penelope hesitated, then supplied, “Different for you?” She sucked in a deep breath, and then nodded, as if the idea surprised her, then settled for her. “Well. Then.”

“It’s not a thing. I mean. It doesn’t have to be a thing.” If this is how she feels about it, then maybe it’s fine to just forget about it and not let anything change. If it’s like that, then…

“Let’s watch the countdown,” she said, interrupting his thoughts with a warm smile, one hand extended to him. “And then we can see what happens after that.”


End file.
